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Month: June 2004

Just saw — finally — Dead Man, which is retroactively my favorite movie ever. (A movie so good I can’t recommend it to anyone I like, as I would think less of them if they didn’t agree wth me on this.) Came up here to see what has been written about it and was stunned to see how many critics completely missed the not-entirely-minor point that this is a bardo movie. Then again, I sat in a room today where American journalism is regularly committed and listened to two senior editors muse that they’d never before heard of “jumping the broom.” Damn are there a lot of white people in my line of work.

So I Google on “dead man” +bardo +jarmusch, and other folk have also noted this, or at least one guy whose words just keep turning up on multiple sites. And I’m paging though these results and finding the same phrases over and over and having these instant flashbacks, and it was not incidentally a transcendentally wretched week, and if I’m online I probably ought to consider getting some work done, and how the foolishness never really changes and these people just don’t know when to lay off and how I don’t seem to be learning from any of this, and all those white people in that office, ghostly white some of ’em, and I came to the unsettling conclusion that, like Johnny Depp, I may well be in the bardo.

Bless his broken heart, his role on the show is to be the guy whose sweater just keeps getting snagged on life, and instead of knitting himself a new one, he rips the whole thing to shreds and then lies in the pile of shredded yarn, weeping.